In the field of TV program broadcasting, it is often wished to persuade a viewer to view specific broadcast program content, in particular advertisements. A system aimed at achieving this goal, known as “Reward for Ad”, exists and has been described in literature relating to this technical field. The “Reward for Ad” system relates to an advertiser employing techniques to persuade a viewer to continue to view parts of a broadcast which he had not previously intended to view and/or, had the advertiser not employed such techniques, the viewer would normally have a tendency to ignore. The techniques used in this system result in a viewer accumulating rewards in return for viewing certain broadcast program content. However the description of the “Reward for Ad” system does not cover the accounting and reporting of such rewards.
Furthermore, in systems such as the “Reward for Ad” system, the rewards accumulated by the viewer usually take the form of credit for the viewing of further program content broadcast on a pay-per-view or other conditional access basis, this credit usually being stored in a conditional access unit used by the viewer to access the broadcast program. One drawback of this system is that such a reward is not necessarily of interest to all viewers and therefore only a part of the potential viewer base will regard the system as providing suitable incentive to watch the broadcast material targeted by the “Reward for Ad” system.
Another drawback is that the credit is locally stored or managed in the viewer's conditional access unit. This can lead to security issues with the possibility of fraudulent access to said credit. The problem the present invention seeks to solve is to reward viewers for watching specific broadcast material in a modular way, i.e. in such a way as to adapt the reward to coincide with something that a particular viewer is interested in. In this way the reward is disconnected from the conditional access environment and indeed does not necessarily apply solely to a pay-per-view situation. Moreover, according to this invention, the security of the reward mechanism is greatly enhanced so that obtaining credit in a fraudulent manner is much more difficult than in the systems described in the prior art.
Special applications called widgets are described in patent application WO2007/35514, which describes an implementation of widgets being displayed on a television set, these widgets being used for activating specific software programs. The applications behind these widgets generally have a predefined function such as for example “Weather broadcast”, “Sport”, “Broadcast events on other channel”. In the available documentation describing the state of the art, the widgets are always visible or available. They are linked to applications of somewhat general interest rather than being directly related to the broadcast program content or more specifically, to the broadcast program content the user is currently viewing. There is no interaction between the content currently being viewed and the widgets displayed as these widgets are managed independently from the viewed content.